THIS invention relates to a printing apparatus, and in particular to a printing apparatus for pricing stock items on supermarket shelves.
Until recently, most items of stock sold in supermarkets were individually labelled with price tags. This involved a shelf packer affixing a price label to each stock item as the items were being placed on the shelves during re-stocking. More recently, a bar coding system has been introduced, in which packaging for a particular item range has a bar code printed thereon identifying the particular item range. A scanner at the check-out counter scans the bar code and a computer to which the scanner is linked positively identifies the item and extracts the price of the item from an on-board memory table.
With the introduction of bar codes, the prices of stock items need to be indicated in a discernible format. The current practice is to provide labels which are held within labelling holders attached to the shelf on which the items are standing. This gives rise to logistic difficulties, as the shelf prices have to be kept identical to the prices on the computer in the face of price changes occurring on a daily basis. The manual replacement of pricing labels is a particularly time consuming and labour intensive process.